What's up with all of these JFK quotes? One could almost think he was a good president the way they keep being tossed around...
Good? So good Threedee, that I don't believe you and I would not be having this conversation if someone other than John Kennedy was President in 1962. We'd be in a long nuclear winter with major parts of America in ruins.
I've read a lot about our 35th President. I think Jack Kennedy was a great man. A man that was brilliantly smart, but he possessed a wisdom beyond his years. He cared about our country, our people and was deeply committed to peace. Had he not been removed by a coup d'état in broad daylight on an American street, this would be a vastly different country...for the better.
Here's something I wrote about him:
John F. Kennedy was the most "human" President in my lifetime. No man had more influence on my own political views. He was a man for all times. He possessed wisdom and scope well beyond his years. And he had an altruistic heart for humanity that ALL leaders should be required to have.
My favorite JFK speech was at Amherst College less than a month before his murder. He recites words of Robert Frost; but reveals to us John Kennedy:
"I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man..."
At a time in life when we believe we are "invincible", John Kennedy confronted his own mortality. A young man that received the last rights of the Church 3 times in his young life. It produced a perspective and wisdom of the ages.
When he faced dire circumstances as President, JFK's heart was always in the same place. After confronting Khrushchev's nuclear brinkmanship in Vienna, he broke down to Bobby: “you know it’s just so implausible that humans could allow this to happen. Bob, it doesn’t matter about you and me; were adults, we’ve lived, but the thought of destroying millions of children that never had a chance.”
Bobby confided to Hugh Sidey of Time Magazine: “I had never seen my brother weep; until he came back from the Vienna Summit and he felt we could not escape a nuclear exchange of some kind.”
That "human" weakness may have saved this planet from a nuclear winter.
It was those same beliefs that guided President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis; an event that we have learned recently was much closer to WWIII than the history books tell us.
Excerpt from The Lessons of JFK: Warrior For Peace
Throughout the 13-day Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy was under relentless pressure from LeMay and nearly his entire national-security circle to "fry" Cuba, in the Air Force chief's memorable language. But J.F.K., whose only key support in the increasingly tense Cabinet Room meetings came from his brother Bobby and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, kept searching for a nonmilitary solution. When Kennedy, assiduously working the back channels to the Kremlin, finally succeeded in cutting a deal with Khrushchev, the world survived "the most dangerous moment in human history," in Schlesinger's words. But no one at the time knew just how dangerous. Years later, attending the 40th anniversary of the crisis at a conference in Havana, Schlesinger, Sorensen and McNamara were stunned to learn that if U.S. forces had attacked Cuba, Russian commanders on the island were authorized to respond with tactical and strategic nuclear missiles. The Joint Chiefs had assured Kennedy during the crisis that "no nuclear warheads were in Cuba at the time," Sorensen grimly noted. "They were wrong." If Kennedy had bowed to his military advisers' pressure, a vast swath of the urban U.S. within missile range of the Soviet installations in Cuba could have been reduced to radioactive rubble.
Thank God for JFK’s wisdom and weakness…
The speech
President John F. Kennedy
October 26, 1963
Dedication of The Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. Click here to listen to this speech.
Excerpts:
The President:
Robert Frost said:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I hope that road will not be the less traveled by, and I hope your commitment to the Great Republic's interest in the years to come will be worthy of your long inheritance since your beginning.
This day devoted to the memory of Robert Frost offers an opportunity for reflection which is prized by politicians as well as by others, and even by poets, for Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem, but to our self- comprehension. In honoring Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.
Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself.
When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.
If sometimes our great artist have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.
And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
President John F. Kennedy - October 26, 1963
Full speech with audio -
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historica...Desk/Speeches/JFK/003POF03Amherst10261963.htm
